The Prairie Wife Part 8

I read for a while, then I took a lamp, went to my room, and deliberately locked the door. My one regret was that I couldn't see d.i.n.ky-Dunk's face when that key turned. And now I must stop writing, and go to bed, for I am dog-tired. I know I'll sleep better to-night. It's nice to remember there's a man near, if he happens to be the man you care a trifle about, even though you _have_ calmly turned the door-key on him.

_Sunday the Third_

d.i.n.ky-Dunk has at least the sensibilities to respect my privacy of life.

He knows where the deadline is, and doesn't disregard it. But it's terribly hard to be tragic in a two-by-four shack. You miss the dignifying touches. And you haven't much leeway for the bulky swings of grandeur.

For one whole day I didn't speak to d.i.n.ky-Dunk, didn't even so much as recognize his existence. I ate by myself, and did my work--when the monster was around--with all the preoccupation of a sleep-walker. But something happened, and I forgot myself. Before I knew it I was asking him a question. He answered it, quite soberly, quite casually. If he had grinned, or shown one jot of triumph, I would have walked out of the shack and never spoken to him again. I think he knew he was on terribly perilous ground. He picked his way with care. He asked me a question back, quite offhandedly, and for the time being let the matter rest there. But the breach was in my walls, Matilda Anne, and I was quite defenseless. We were both very impersonal and very polite, when he came in at supper time, though I think I turned a visible pink when I sat down at the table, for our eyes met there, just a moment and no more. I knew he was watching me, covertly, all the time. And I knew I was making him pretty miserable. But I wasn't the least bit ashamed of it.

After supper he indifferently announced that he had nothing to do and might as well help me wash up. I went to hand him a dish-towel. Instead of taking the towel he took my hand, with the very profane e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, as he did so, of "Oh, h.e.l.l, Gee-Gee, what's the use?"

Then before I knew it, he had me in his arms (our b.u.t.ter-dish was broken in the collision) and I was weak enough to feel sorry for him and his poor tragic pleading eyes. Then I gave up. If I was silly enough to have a little cry on his shoulder, I had the satisfaction of feeling him give a gulp or two himself.

"You're the most wonderful woman in the world!" he solemnly told me, and then in a much less solemn way he began kissing me again. But the barriers were down. And how we talked that night! And how different everything seemed! And how nice it was to feel his arm over my shoulder and his quiet breathing on the nape of my neck as I fell asleep. It seemed as though Love were fanning me with its softest wings. I'm happy again. But I've been wondering if it's environment that makes character, or character that makes environment. Sometimes I think it's one way, and sometimes I feel it's the other. But I can't be sure of my answer--yet!

It's hard for a spoiled woman to remember that her life has to be merged into somebody else's life. I've been wondering if marriage isn't like a two-panel screen, which won't stand up if both its panels are too much in line. Heaven knows, I want harmony! But a woman likes to feel that instead of being out of step with her whole regiment of life it's the regiment that's out of step with her. To-night I unlaced d.i.n.ky-Dunk's shoes, and put on his slippers, and sat on the floor between his knees with my head against the steady _tick-tock_ of his watch-pocket.

"d.i.n.ky-Dunk," I solemnly announced, "that gink called Pope was a poor guesser. The proper study of man should have been _woman_!"

_Thursday the Seventh_

Everything at Casa Grande has settled back into the usual groove. There is a great deal to do about the shack. The grimmest bug-bear of domestic work is dish-was.h.i.+ng. A pile of greasy plates is the one thing that gets on my nerves. And it is a little Waterloo that must be faced three times every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. And I was never properly "broke" for domesticity and the dish-pan! Why can't some genius invent a self-was.h.i.+ng fry-pan? My hair is growing so long that I can now do it up in a sort of half-hearted French roll. It has been quite cold, with a wonderful fall of snow. The sleighing could not be better.

_Sat.u.r.day the Ninth_

d.i.n.ky-Dunk's Christmas present came to-day, over two weeks late. He had never mentioned it, and I had not only held my peace, but had given up all thought of getting a really-truly gift from my lord and master.

They brought it out from Buckhorn, in the bobsleigh, all wrapped up in old buffalo-robes and blankets and tarpaulins. _It's a baby-grand piano_, and a beauty, and it came all the way from Winnipeg. But either the s.h.i.+pping or the knocking about or the extreme cold has put it terribly out of tune, and it can't be used until the piano-tuner travels a couple of hundred miles out here to put it in shape. And it's far too big for the shack, even when pushed right up into the corner. But d.i.n.ky-Dunk says that before next winter there'll be a different sort of house on this spot where Casa Grande now stands.

"And that's to keep your soul alive, in the meantime," he announced. I scolded him for being so extravagant, when he needed every dollar he could lay his hands on. But he wouldn't listen to me. In fact, it only started an outburst.

"My G.o.d, Gee-Gee," he cried, "haven't you given up enough for me?

Haven't you sacrificed enough in coming out here to the end of nowhere and leaving behind everything that made life decent?"

"Why, Honey Chile, didn't I get _you_?" I demanded. But even that didn't stop him.

"Don't you suppose I ever think what it's meant to you, to a woman like you? There are certain things we can't have, but there are some things we're going to have. This next ten or twelve months will be hard, but after that there's going to be a change--if the Lord's with me, and I have a white man's luck!"

"And supposing we have bad luck?" I asked him. He was silent for a moment or two.

"We can always give up, and go back to the city," he finally said.

"Give up!" I said with a whoop. "Give up? Not on your life, Mister Dour Man! We're not going to be Dixonites! We're going to win out!" And we were together in a death-clinch, hugging the breath out of each other, when Olie came in to ask if he hadn't better get the stock stabled, as there was bad weather coming.

_Monday the Eleventh_

We are having the first real blizzard of the winter. It began yesterday, as Olie intimated, and for all the tail-end of the day my d.i.n.ky-Dunk was on the go, in the bitter cold, looking after fuel and feed and getting things s.h.i.+p-shape, for all the world like a skipper who's read his barometer and seen a hurricane coming. There had been no wind for a couple of days, only dull and heavy skies with a disturbing sense of quietness. Even when I heard Olie and d.i.n.ky-Dunk shouting outside, and shoring up the shack-walls with poles, I could not quite make out what it meant.

Then the blizzard came. It came down out of the northwest, like a cloudburst. It hummed and sang, and then it whined, and then it screamed, screamed in a high falsetto that made you think poor old Mother Earth was in her last throes! The snow was fine and hard, really minute particles of ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the East, little sharp-angled diamond-points that stung the skin like fire.

It came in almost horizontal lines, driving flat across the unbroken prairie and defying anything made of G.o.d or man to stop it. Nothing did stop it. Our shack and the bunk-house and stables and hay-stacks tore a few pin-feathers off its breast, though; and those few feathers are drifts higher than my head, heaped up against each and all of the buildings.

I scratched the frost off a window-pane, where feathery little drifts were seeping in through the sill-cracks, when it first began. But the wind blew harder and harder and the shack rocked and shook with the tension. Oh, such a wind! It made a whining and wailing noise, with each note higher, and when you felt that it couldn't possibly increase, that it simply _must_ ease off, or the whole world would go smash, why, that whining note merely grew tenser and the wind grew stronger. How it lashed things! How it shook and flailed and trampled this poor old earth of ours! Just before supper Olie announced that he'd look after my chicks for me. I told him, quite casually, that I'd attend to them myself. I usually strew a mixture of wheat and oats on the litter in the hen-house overnight. This had two advantages, one was that it didn't take me out quite so early in the morning, and the other was that the chicks themselves started scratching around first thing in the morning and so got exercise and kept themselves warmer-bodied and in better health.

It was not essential that I should go to the hen-house myself, but I was possessed with a sudden desire to face that singing white tornado. So I put on my things, while d.i.n.ky-Dunk was at work in the stables. I put on furs and leggings and gauntlets and all, as though I were starting for a ninety-mile drive, and slipped out. d.i.n.ky-Dunk had tunneled through the drift in front of the door, but that tunnel was already beginning to fill again. I plowed through it, and tried to look about me. Everything was a sort of streaked misty gray, an all-enveloping m.u.f.fing leaden maelstrom that hurt your skin when you lifted your head and tried to look it in the face. Once, in a lull of the wind when the snow was not so thick, I caught sight of the hay-stacks. That gave me a line on the hen-house. So I made for it, on the run, holding my head low as I went.

It was glorious, at first, it made my lungs pump and my blood race and my legs tingle. Then the storm-devils howled in my eyes and the ice-lashes snapped in my face. Then the wind went off on a rampage again, and I couldn't see. I couldn't move forward. I couldn't even breathe. Then I got frightened.

I leaned there against the wind calling for d.i.n.ky-Dunk and Olie, whenever I could gasp breath enough to make a sound. But I might as well have been a baby crying in mid-ocean to a Kensington Gardens nurse.

Then I knew I was lost. No one could ever hear me in that roar. And there was nothing to be seen, just a driving, blinding, stinging gray pall of flying fury that nettled the naked skin like electric-ma.s.sage and took the breath out of your buffeted body. There was no land-mark, no glimpse of any building, nothing whatever to go by. And I felt so helpless in the face of that wind! It seemed to take the power of locomotion from my legs. I was not altogether amazed at the thought that I might die there, within a hundred yards of my own home, so near those narrow walls within which were warmth, and shelter, and quietness. I imagined how they'd find my body, deep under the snow, some morning; how d.i.n.ky-Dunk would search, perhaps for days. I felt so sorry for him I decided not to give up, that I wouldn't be lost, that I wouldn't die there like a fly on a sheet of tanglefoot!

I had fallen down on my knees, with my back to the wind, and already the snow had drifted around me. I also found my eye-lashes frozen together, and I lost several winkers in getting rid of those solidified tears. But I got to my feet and battled on, calling when I could. I kept on, going round and round in a circle, I suppose, as people always do when they're lost in a storm. Then the wind grew worse again. I couldn't make any headway against it. I had to give up. I simply _had_ to! I wasn't afraid. I wasn't terrified at the thought of what was happening to me. I was only sorry, with a misty sort of sorrow I can't explain. And I don't remember that I felt particularly uncomfortable, except for the fact I found it rather hard to breathe.

It was Olie who found me. He came staggering through the snow with extra fuel for the bunk-house, and nearly walked over me. As we found out afterward, I wasn't more than thirty steps away from that bunk-house door. Olie pulled me up out of the snow the same as you'd pull a skein of darning-silk out of a work-basket. He half carried me to the bunk-house, got his bearings, and then steered me for the shack. It was a fight, but we made it. And d.i.n.ky-Dunk was still out looking after his stock and doesn't know how nearly he lost his Lady Bird. I've made Olie promise not to say a word about it. But the top of my nose is red and swollen. I think it must have got a trifle frost-nipped, in the encounter. The weather has cleared now, and the wind has gone down. But it is very cold, and d.i.n.ky-Dunk has just reported that it's already forty-eight below zero.

_Tuesday the Nineteenth_

The days slip away and I scarcely know where they go. The weather is wonderful. Clear and cold, with such heaps of suns.h.i.+ne you'd never dream it was zero weather. But you have to be careful, and always wear furs when you're driving, or out for any length of time. Three hours in this open air is as good as a pint of c.h.i.n.kie's best champagne. It makes me tingle. We are living high, with several barrels of frozen game--geese, duck and prairie-chicken--and also an old tin trunk stuffed full of beef-roasts, cut the right size. I bring them in and thaw them out overnight, as I need them. The freezing makes them very tender. But they must be completely thawed before they go into the oven, or the outside will be overdone and the inside still raw. I learned that by experience.

My appet.i.te is disgraceful, and I'm still gaining. c.h.i.n.kie could never again say I reminded him of one of the lean kine in Pharaoh's dream.

I have been asking d.i.n.ky-Dunk if it isn't downright cruelty to leave horses and cattle out on the range in weather like this. My husband says not, so long as they have a wind-break in time of storms. The animals paw through the snow for gra.s.s to eat, and when they get thirsty they can eat the snow itself, which, d.i.n.ky-Dunk solemnly a.s.sures me, almost never gives them sore throat! But the open prairie, just at this season, is a most inhospitable looking pasturage, and the unbroken glare of white makes my eyes ache.... There's one big indoor task I finally have accomplished, and that is tuning my piano. It made my heart heavy, standing there useless, a gloomy monument of ironic grandeur.

As a girl I used to watch Katrinka's long-haired Alsatian putting her concert grand to rights, and I knew that my ear was dependable enough.

So the second day after my baby grand's arrival I went at it with a monkey-wrench. But that was a failure. Then I made a drawing of a tuning-hammer and had Olie secretly convey it to the Buckhorn blacksmith, who in turn concocted a great steel hollow-headed monstrosity which actually fits over the pins to which the piano wires are strung, even though the aforesaid monstrosity is heavy enough to stun an ox with. But it did the work, although it took about two half-days, and now every note is true. So now I have music! And d.i.n.ky-Dunk does enjoy my playing, these long winter evenings. Some nights we let Olie come in and listen to the concert. He sits rapt, especially when I play ragtime, which seems the one thing that touches his holy of holies. Poor Olie! I surely have a good friend in that silent, faithful, uncouth Swede!

d.i.n.ky-Dunk himself is so thin that it worries me. But he eats well and doesn't anathematize my cooking. He's getting a few gray hairs, at the temples. I think they make him look rather _distingue_. But they worry my poor d.i.n.ky-Dunk. "Hully Gee," he said yesterday, studying himself for the third time in his shaving-gla.s.s, "I'm getting old!" He laughed when I started to whistle "Believe me if all those endearing young charms, which I gaze on so fondly to-day," but at heart he was really disturbed by the discovery of those few white hairs. I've been telling him that the ladies won't love him any more, and that his cut-up days are over. He says I'll have to make up for the others. So I started for him with my Australian crawl-stroke. It took me an hour to get the taste of shaving soap out of my mouth. d.i.n.ky-Dunk says I'm so full of life that I _sparkle_. All I know is that I'm happy, supremely and ridiculously happy!

_Sunday the Thirty-first_